The Shounen Club (ザ少年倶楽部) schedule has been a bit less predictable recently, but hopefully it’ll get back to normal starting in October. Anyway, this is the much-anticipated second September episode.

The Hey! Say! Jump hosts for this episode were the same as for the first September episode – Arioka Daiki-kun, Chinen Yuri-kun, and Yaotome Hikaru-kun. Since the theme is “arigatou”, it makes perfect sense that they kicked things off with “Arigatou ~Sekai no Doko ni Itemo~”:

Their three voices took care of the song quite nicely – surprisingly well, in fact – as they performed a two-minute version of the song. The dance moves were all still there, though only an outline of what they’d do with the whole group present.

This is the final episode of HamaKisu (濱キス), but don’t worry, it’s just changing its name to “KisuHama Learning” (キス濱ラーニング) and will be back under that name next week. There’s a website キス濱ラーニング.com which doesn’t have much on it for now, but bears the distinction of being the first website I’ve ever visited that doesn’t use the latin alphabet in its address – something that only recently became possible. It comes out as gibberish in the address bar, though, showing the raw code – I hope they fix that.

Anyway, on with the show. What will we get as a grand finale? A teary graduation? Or something more surprising? Maybe both:

The plan for this episode seems to revolve around one word – kandou (感動 – being emotionally moved). Of course, any variety show star would have to be ready to display that kind of reaction at a moment’s notice. What sort of stimuli does Hamaguchi-san have planned?

And so we reach the grand finale of Kuro no Onna Kyoushi (黒の女教師). If you haven’t seen the rest of this series up to this point, and intend to do so, read no further! Answers to questions we’ve asked all season will be revealed.

It has taken me a lot longer to get through this than I could have imagined. Who came up with this silly idea of reviewing a twenty-four hour telethon? Oh, right . . . .

Well, things will get steadily more dramatic as we get closer to part 10. If you have no idea what this is all about, take a peek at the post on Part 1 here. Part 7 started around 11:20 a.m on Aug 26th. Here are the links to Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.

As those making donations are greeted and thanked by various stars . . .

. . . we get a brief glimpse of the story of sixteen year old Rinka-chan, who has high blood pressure in her pulmonary artery, and is visited by Aiba-kun in his capacity as Shimura Doubutsu-en co-host.